The Literary Shudder

In the London Review of Books, Frank Kermode diagrams the move in Eliot, Auden, Baudelaire, Shakespeare, and others:

Among the reactions to a suitable stimulus are elevation of the eyebrows, protrusion of the lips, erection of the hair and contraction of the platysma muscle. The contraction of this muscle, which extends from the collarbone up each side of the neck, can drastically alter the appearance: the jaw drops, the pupils dilate and so on. The first sensation of fear, or the imagination of something dreadful, commonly excites a shudder, and a simultaneous contraction of the platysma. The OED defines the word, but without citing Darwin. The behaviour of the muscle registers a response to fear, horror, pain or the fear of it, or pain in others, or anger, or sometimes disgust.Evidently the biologist could see that the shudder, though often a trivial matter, was a highly emotional affair, deeply involved with acts of imagination as well as with more commonplace reactions to cold or fear. It is easy, then, to imagine an act of reading as accompanied by shuddering, and that seems to be the context of Eliot’s remarks on those lines from In Memoriam . . .